Thrifting is always an adventure, because you never know what you find. Sometimes you’ll find a legitimately cool item; other times you’ll find something that leaves you so deeply confused you’ll lie awake in bed thinking about it for the next three months. Scrounge is a TTRPG that leans into this, asking you to go through a thrift store and come up with backstories that explain what some of these weird items are and how they ended up on the shelf, waiting to be sold.
Created by Paper Nautilus, Scrounge is a TTRPG with options for solo or multiplayer play. To play the TTRPG, you’ll need two six-sided dice, a way to keep notes, and a real-world thrift store you can walk around.
Finding The Gems In The Thrift
At the start of the game, the players (regardless of number) have a collective $20 to spend at the thrift store. Players take turns to go around the thrift store until they find an interesting item within their budget. After selecting an item, the player rolls the D6s on a few tables to get some prompts and keywords about the item. The first roll tells you something about the object itself (e.g., if it’s cursed or part of a bigger set); the second 2D6 roll suggests something about the object’s history (e.g., not used for its intended purpose or it has historical importance), and the final D6 roll gives you a prompt about the object’s lore.
The player uses these prompts and keywords to devise a short description of the object, covering what it is, who owned it, and how it ended up in this thrift store. Once this is done, the next player takes their turn and repeats the process until the group runs out of money and can’t buy anything else.
However, players do have to be on their toes because some prompts have unique gimmicks. For example, if you roll the Mimic prompt on the final table, you discover your item is a mimic and have to quickly put it back on the shelf. Other prompts drain your cash, reducing the amount the following players get to use on their turns.
Social Fun Without Humiliation
Scrounge is a really fun game that will delight TTRPG fans who love world-building games and games you play in unusual settings. The game’s prompts are really well constructed, doing a good job of offering players solid directions that force them to think and be creative with the objects they find while also taking into account that, depending on your region, thrift stores can have vastly different items for sale. Thus, due to this excellent prompt writing, you’ll never end up in a situation where you have a prompt that fits no available item.
I also like the shared wallet for multiplayer games, as the limited budget helps keep the game moving by limiting your objects, while also forcing some outside-the-box thinking, as, due to your lower budget, you’ll be forced to skip over big, obvious items and go for random cheaper ones (which, due to how thrift stores work, will likely be weird in their own special way).
However, I would suggest maybe upping the starting amount if you have 4 or more players, as it can run out pretty quickly, especially if you roll a couple of prompts that take away some of your money.
My only main complaint about Scrounge is that I wish there were a couple more gimmick-based prompts. While I appreciate that the game has clearly made sure you can play this game in public without it being instantly obvious or disruptive to the people around you, some of the most memorable moments of my playthrough came when I got the infected or mimic lore prompts (one of which drains your cash, the other makes you quickly put the item back), as they really helped enhance the theme of exploring and collecting weird and wonderful objects.
So, a couple more unique prompts that mess with you in some way (like maybe making you swap the object for the first thing you see behind you, or one that makes the next player pick something with a specific color or detail) would help make this experience even more memorable and lead to players coming up with even wilder backstories or the objects they find while raiding their local thrift.
Scrounge is a fantastic TTRPG. While the idea of playing in a thrift store may sound weird at first, those who can get over their social anxiety will be treated to a really fun world-building TTRPG, one that can be used to create items that can be used in longer, campaign-style games. Plus, with its simple rules and object-based gameplay, it is also a great first TTRPG, giving TTRPG newbies a solid foundation to build on, without ever railroading them down one specific path.
